Crawling from the Wreckage by Gwynne Dyer

“apology” here—although Christians certainly owed apologies to the Jews for two millennia of slander and persecution—nor even “reconciliation.” John Paul II went far beyond that, though few members of the general public realized it at the time: he recognized Judaism as a true religion.
    There is an old saying, beloved of Catholic theologians, that “error has no rights.” It drives the ecumenical crowd crazy, but it is perfectlylogical: if you believe that your religion is true, then the others are false. John Paul II was perfectly affable and hospitable to various Protestant Christians who came to visit, but he truly believed that they were wrong, wrong, wrong—and he refused to enter into the equal relationships that they imagined possible between the various Christian sects.
    He was more open to the Orthodox Christian world, both because he came from Eastern Europe himself and because the quarrel between the Orthodox churches and the Church of Rome has always been about hierarchical and stylistic matters, not basic doctrinal issues. It was in his relations with non-Christian religions also in the lineage of Abraham, however, that John Paul II broke decisively with Christian and Catholic tradition.
    After fourteen hundred years of constant and intimate contact between the Muslim and Christian peoples around the Mediterranean, he was the first pope ever to enter a mosque. He doubtless continued to believe that Christianity was the one true successor to Judaism and that Islam was a post-Jewish, post-Christian heresy, but he was the first pope to argue that cordial relations between them were possible and desirable. And, in the case of the Jews, he went much further.
    It’s understandable that the new religion of Christianity, struggling to distance itself from its Jewish roots, should have insisted that the Christian revelation had invalidated and replaced the older faith. By implication, however, that meant that those Jews who refused to convert were in revolt against God—and from that mindset came the Christian image of Jews as “Christ killers,” and two millennia of savage Christian persecution culminating in the European Holocaust of 1942–45.
    Karol Wojtyla was a witness to that Holocaust, which may be why he did the extraordinary thing that he did. On his visit to Israel in 2000, he posted a prayer in a niche in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall that said: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant.”
    By posting that prayer in the wall, he acknowledged that this uniquely Jewish method of communicating with the Almighty is valid; and by its contents, he accepted that the Jewish covenant with God is still in force.It was a thing done in a moment, but it ended two thousand years of Christian rejection of Judaism. The Catholic Church, while still advocating the conversion of everybody else, no longer seeks the conversion of the Jews, which is as close as it can get to acknowledging the equal validity of the Jewish faith.
    That was the Big Thing that John Paul II did, and it is more important and will last far longer than all the other things he did put together.
    Doctrinal disputes, within or even among the three great Abrahamic religions, are of limited interest to those who do not share their particular beliefs, but the
political
relations among these three great religions matter a lot. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute poisons the relationship between Jews and Muslims everywhere. The Christian-Muslim relationship has been fraught from the very beginning, when half of the then-Christian world was conquered by Muslim armies in little more than a century. Unlike the localized, and to some extent encysted, quarrel between the